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thewayneA private company assigns license plates to violations, and guess what happens when they can't match the violation - it gets assigned to NULL!
This is a database bug. Null is the concept of absence of value. It is not zero, zero is a value. It is not an empty string. It is an absence of value. It means "this license plate field does not exist". And you cannot compare nulls to nulls - does not compute. Null does not equal Null.
Now, in the case of this guy, his license plate is a string of the letters "NULL". Perfectly valid word. In fact, at a previous job I found someone who had the name of Null! It was their actual family name!
So whoever designed the database is doing a string match where they're doing something like
IF LookupFails 'can't find a match for the plate in the MVD database
IF [LicensePlate]="NULL" THEN 'we have a match!
'send the fine to the owner of this license plate
not realizing that some joker might register the license plate NULL.
It's an illustration of bad programming technique that any first year programmer should have gotten an F on their assignment for.
He's gotten the fines dismissed, but continues to receive them.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/08/license_plate_n.html
The comments are amusing - if you're a programmer.
This is a database bug. Null is the concept of absence of value. It is not zero, zero is a value. It is not an empty string. It is an absence of value. It means "this license plate field does not exist". And you cannot compare nulls to nulls - does not compute. Null does not equal Null.
Now, in the case of this guy, his license plate is a string of the letters "NULL". Perfectly valid word. In fact, at a previous job I found someone who had the name of Null! It was their actual family name!
So whoever designed the database is doing a string match where they're doing something like
IF LookupFails 'can't find a match for the plate in the MVD database
IF [LicensePlate]="NULL" THEN 'we have a match!
'send the fine to the owner of this license plate
not realizing that some joker might register the license plate NULL.
It's an illustration of bad programming technique that any first year programmer should have gotten an F on their assignment for.
He's gotten the fines dismissed, but continues to receive them.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/08/license_plate_n.html
The comments are amusing - if you're a programmer.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-24 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-24 04:09 pm (UTC)I think he did it on purpose to screw with them, or he's a really serious DBA. He would have changed it if he was just joking around.
♦
Date: 2019-08-24 09:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-25 04:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-25 03:26 pm (UTC)It's just plain bad programming. But also bad management supervision/code review/testing problem to allow that code to go into production! So it's a multi-level problem.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-25 07:50 pm (UTC)